"Now"--she went on in the same breathless hurried way--"I _want_ love! I am starving, thirsting for it! I want to be drowned in it, lost in it, killed by it! Nothing else will content me!" I folded her still closer in my arms. "Did I not say you would change, Sibyl?" I whispered--"Your coldness and insensibility to love was unnatural and could not last,--my darling, I always knew that!" "You always knew!" she echoed a little disdainfully--"Ah, but you do not know even now what has chanced to me. Nor shall I tell you--yet. Oh Geoffrey!--" Here she drew herself out of my embrace, and stooping, gathered some bluebells in the grass--"See these little flowers growing so purely and peacefully in the shade by the Avon!--they remind me of what I was, here in this very place, long ago. I was quite as happy, and I think as innocent as these blossoms; I had no thought of evil in my nature,--and the only love I dreamed of was the love of the fairy prince for the fairy princess,--as harmless an idea as the loves of the flowers themselves. Yes!--I was then all I should like to be now,--all that I am not!" "You are everything that is beautiful and sweet!"--I told her, admiringly, as I watched the play of retrospective and tender expression on her perfect face. "So you judge,--being a man who is perfectly satisfied with his own choice of a wife!" she said with a flash of her old cynicism--"But I know myself better than you know me. You call me beautiful and sweet,--but you cannot call me good! I am not good. Why, the very love that now consumes me is----" "What?" I asked her quickly, seizing her hands with the blue-bells in them, and gazing searchingly into her eyes--"I know before you speak, that it is the passion and tenderness of a true woman!" She was silent for a moment. Then she smiled, with a bewitching languor. "If you know, then I need not tell you"--she said--"So, do not let us stay here any longer talking nonsense;--'society' will shake its head over us and accuse us of 'bad form,' and some lady-paragraphist will write to the papers, and, say--'Mr Tempest's conduct as a host left much to be desired, as he and his bride-elect were "spooning" all the day.'" "There are no lady-paragraphists here,"--I said laughing, and encircling her dainty waist with one arm as I walked. "Oh, are there not, though!" she exclaimed, laughing also, "Why, you don't suppose you can give any sort of big entertainment without them do you? They permeate society. Old Lady Maravale, for example, who is rather reduced in circumstances, writes a guinea's worth of scandal a week for one of the papers. And _she_ is here,--I saw her simply gorging herself with chicken salad and truffles an hour ago!" Here pausing, and resting against my arm, she peered through the trees. "There are the chimneys of Lily Cottage where the famous Mavis Clare lives," she said.